Create. Build. Execute.

The other day I was talking with a few friends about the OpenTechSchool initiative that I am very proud to be part of. One question we were talking about, was the reason behind that whole thing and I painted this picture, the perfect world scenario in which the OpenTechSchool would cease to exist because it simply wouldn’t have any point any more. And if that would be the case I’d be happy for it to cease to exist.

If you charge for your app, service or content before the customer has received it, you have fewer customers as each one of them is harder to acquire. That’s why many services offer to use them for free to a certain extent and only pay if you continue using them, which in reality usually requires limiting the free usage. The other big business model is the free-as-in-advertising model big companies like Google and Facebook are running on, it is free for you but your private data will be used and sold to others to advertise towards you. And especially for running network-structure businesses, where limiting the users always means limiting yourself, this sounds like the only do-able solution. But a new payment model is on the rise promising fix this mistake: the free to pay business model.

In one of my recent articles I made the point that in our field of technology development, we rarely test whether the proposed solution actually adds significantly more value than if you’d replace it with random results. Today I want to discuss this from another angle a bit further. And that is from a product proposition perspective for the person using it, also know as, it “always fails”.

Sure, Berlin is in the startup-hype-phase. And that attract many foreigners. But some voices raise the question of why that is, making the really interesting point on that there have been very little huge success stories with unique and interesting ideas and inventions here for a while. While some argue that is because of a lack of innovation in the blood of germans, I argue it is a very comfortable market size that holds them back. If you think about it makes perfect sense and doesn’t only explain why so many German Companies never expand above the border but also why some countries, like in the north or south of europe, have unproportionally many big successors.

So Google recently launched keep, basically an Evernote competitor with some nice looking features like check-lists inside. As I had to do some larger groceries shopping for an extensive Thai-Food-Meal anyways, I decided to give it a spin. And after typing in the list of 50+ items into my phone - which takes way to long and I won’t repeat again, I went out to get those groceries. Boy, never again. As so many other todo-list apps and project managers, also Google Keep fails on one major aspect: getting out of the way.

For years and years there has been an on-going debate about Germany being “a service desert” and though Berlin might be a obscure island in a big ocean, it is very true here as well. The more people I meet, coming here to work in the Berlin industry the more I understand their difficulties with this. It is really hard to understand why there isn’t any tax accountant taking the effort to try to speak English or why there aren’t many companies specifically trying to help foreign to settle here by providing support with paperwork and such. As a kid, who grew up in East Westfalia - an exceptionally penurious part of Germany - I am used to this and never experienced it as a problem, nor ever thought about it. But me recently being to London made me realise what it is: the German mentality of optimising efficiency, the single one thing which got us through the crisis rather okay-ish, is also our biggest curse and will hurt us in the long run.

Postponing the decision process has long-been a inner-human nature and as such not only been fostered in big-corporation environment but basically everywhere. Especially with the huge amount of possibilities we have in western society, the paradoxy of choice doesn’t really make things easier. As a result very often, we rather don’t take any decision or postpone and defer it as long as we can. In hopes of not making the wrong one. What we are not aware of is that this is probably the worst decision we can take. Because not deciding is a decision.

After introducting the different ways of crowdfunding existing nowadays in Germany last week, today I’d like to discuss the only investment-model in there a bit further: crowdinvestments are when a very large group in a high quantity but low individual volume invests in an upcoming company to finance its development and growth through a more or less public auction. Or so it should be; While because of the legal structure in Germany and the high complications (and costs) of changes in shareholders of a GmbH (and UG), the crowd isn’t holding actual shares but a complicated system with shadow-shares and debt-contracts to make that system appear to work. All of that coming with its own set of benefits and problems, most people are unaware of. But boy you should be.